Where is the Centre?

Yeats’ line from The Second Coming, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” has become a terrible cliché like all great lines. Yet, refer to it here I will because nothing depicts better the plight of this state than this line.

States rise and fall on the basis of how strong the Centre is and by Centre I mean the numbers that come to accept what they think the state stands for and where it must place itself in relation to other states. When the journey begins, there can be contending ideologies. Sometimes the contest is bloody, resulting in minor and major revolutions and even civil wars. But it is important for a successful state to have a large, strong Centre since ultimately it is these people who keep the balance between the Right and the Left.

It is important, too, because for both Left and Right, to become politically relevant requires playing on the Centre turf. Both have to centrise some part of themselves. The Left becomes a little more conservative, the Right a little less. Thus is held the balance by the Centre.

Not so here. The Left (and I use the term rather loosely) is right on many counts: it is secular, culturally liberal and believes in pluralism, all of which a centrist like me shares with them. But it, when it comes to issues of realpolitik, wavers between idealism and neo-liberalism rather than realism. This is where I part company with them.

The Right is an abomination for the most part. To think that a plain murderer can be celebrated, that a hapless woman must die because that is the only way we can define ourselves, that minorities must live in perpetual fear, that personal freedoms must be taken away and that we must have our version of medieval Christian autos-de-fe is to create a living hell, not a state. That the Right here must come to represent the state is a shame; even worse that a state’s conservative strategy, the essence of realism, must become subject to their measure of it.

The Centre weds within it a state’s pluralism and its strategic realism. That Centre we do not have and that’s what makes us so weak. The Left would stand up for everything except Pakistan; the Right wants to fight an Armageddon and have this state isolated and become a pariah.

The Left wants Raymond Davis to walk away, citing diplomatic immunity, ignoring the dubiousness of it; the Right wants him hung, drawn and quartered even if he were a diplomat. Here’s a hypothetical scenario reversing exactly what happened in Lahore: A Pakistani undercover operative kills two Americans in Washington’s Dupont Circle; a vehicle that comes to his aid and runs over another American. The vehicle disappears; the operative is captured. This is how the Right and the Left would react.

The Left would ignore the issue of immunity; blame the ISI for having sent someone to create mischief; argue that ‘realpolitik’ demanded that Islamabad come clean on what this guy was doing in Washington etcetera. Essentially, they would reverse all those arguments they are trotting out now vis-a-vis Davis.

As would the Right. They would demand that immunity and international law must be respected, the same bird that must be killed in the case of Davis. Hold rallies in the name of national honour and press the government that it should get the man back etcetera. Essentially, in this case too, the current arguments will all be reversed.

Where is the Centre in this country? Even more miniscule it is than what is left of the Left. The Centre believes neither in capitulation nor a perennial expression of the national flagpole. It is neither mushy nor violently emotional. The Centre is supposed to understand how interstate relations work, knowing that it would neither dismiss America as a country that Pakistan can take on unnecessarily, nor consider Pakistan an entity that any other state can walk all over as and when it so desires. It holds the balance.

It comes into existence when people understand the requirement at home of secular pluralism and cultural liberalism and the necessity of dealing with other states on the basis of hard-nosed realism. Why have we failed to develop that balance is another debate.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 21^st, 2011.